Margot Leonie Edman (born Hanel April 7, 1912
[ 4
] in Berlin , died
May 30, 1941 in Stockholm) was the companion of author
Karin Boye.
The two lived together from 1934 to 1941.
Hanel was of Jewish birth and, after the Nazi occupation, received help from
Boye to emigrate to Sweden.In
Sweden, she trained as bookkeeper and started
[ 5
] studying to
become a nurse [ 6
] .
After Boye's death she committed suicide .

Margot Hanel and her four siblings grew up in Berlin.[ 2
] She had two
brothers and two sisters (Gerda and Charlotte), a Christian father and a
Jewish mother.[ 7
] The young Margot
Hanel met Karin Boye for the first time in 1932
[ 8
] at a lesbian
party in the city.
Boye had for the first time been experimenting her homosexuality
[ 9
] ;
According to Boye's friend Kajsa Höglund, who occasionally shared an apartment
with her in Berlin, Karin Boye was Margot's first physical love relationship.
In addition, she would have been the first to love that Karin Boye had for her
own sake and not because she was a famous writer .[ 2
]

The fact that Boye ended up in Berlin was not entirely unexpected.
She had earlier being attracted to Germany since her grandfather was German.
In Berlin she also worked with Frida Uhl , previously married to August
Strindberg .
Boye translated Uhl's work into Swedish.[ 9
]

Hanel's Jewish background - her mother was Jewish - would have consequences.
After the Hitler regime's takeover in 1933 she had to take action to avoid
persecution.

Boye eventually arranged for Hanel to move to Sweden.
There she had a marriage of convenience with a Swedish man to get Swedish
citizenship .
Margot Hanel, in fact, lived with Boye for seven years, in the apartment at
Skeppargatan 102 at Gärdet in Stockholm.
Already in 1934 Karin Boye described his life mate (in a letter to the
dramatist Ebbe Linde ) as "my wife"
[ 10
] .
She went to nursing education and later learned to be a bookbinder.

The relationship between Karin Boye and Margot Hanel was not completely
smooth.
Several Karin Boye's historians have testified about the different
personalities of the women, which, however, do not detract from the strong
links between them.
After a conflicted time in the relationship, Margot Hanel traveled to Berlin
in September 1934.
She was back in Sweden three months later, a time when Boye used to work on
her book ( Kris ).
Boye later explained in a letter to Ebbe Linde that the crisis in the
relationship had settled.
She described in the letter how relationships in general and her and Hanel's
kind of relationship in particular were like a lottery, but that she had
difficulty imagining "something fate that may be worse than being sentenced to
eternal loneliness."[ 10
]

Shortly after Boyes's death, Hanel also committed suicide, by gas poisoning .
She was cremated , as instructed in her will , and is buried at the northern
burial ground in Solna.[ 2
]

Although the Boye family seemed to accept the daughter's homosexual
orientation, Margot Hanel's burial near her was denied.
Among other things, the women's correspondence was burned shortly after
Boyes's death.
This fact has been noted by Pia Garde , who in 1993 wrote in the journal
Parnass that Karin Boyes mother, Signe, was a spiritist and said she had
received a directive from Karin to destroy all the letters and poems she wrote
to Margot Hanel.[ 2
]

Even after his death, Margot Hanel has been treated with distance and
degradation.[ 11
] Margit Abenius ,
whose biography of Boye ( Pillow of Purity ) came in 1950, described
Hanel as "not intellectual, neither intelligent, at all, had no spiritual
resources that even approached Karin Boye's" and about her family she said she
was "born in an unhappy marriage".[ 10
] Pia Garde
explained (1989) that the total of five siblings "grew up in a strict but
rather happy home" and that at least three of the siblings lived in "normal
conditions" married and had children and grandchildren.

In
connection with the 70th anniversary of Karin Boye's death, a sign was placed
on the house where she lived the last eight years of her life (since 1934
together with Hanel).
The sign is supplemented with the poem "To you", dedicated to Margot Hanel.[ 12
]